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We published episode 262 of Core Intuition today. It’s December already, so we’ve inevitably been thinking about unfinished projects as the year wraps up. From the show notes:

Daniel and Manton talk about coping with disappointment of failing to achieve goals in an expected length of time, recognize the differing demands of building software for different markets, and talk about tricks for managing lack of enthusiasm for finishing projects. Finally, they answer a listener question about how to get started with consulting, and planning for maintaining a suitable income when you “quit your day job.”

Yesterday we published episode 260 of Core Intuition. From the show notes:

Daniel and Manton discuss Sal Soghoian’s sudden departure from Apple, and what it may mean for Apple’s future ambitions with automation. Then they react to Apple’s alleged decision to abandon their line of AirPort branded routers, and bemoan the loss of yet another “just buy the Apple one” peripheral option

I liked the topics for our show this week because it allowed us to not just talk about AppleScript as it exists today, but also to reflect on what life developing scriptable apps was like in the early days of AppleScript. It’s always fun to think back on 1990s Mac development.

Many of our listeners are celebrating Thanksgiving today. To all of our listeners, whether you’ve listened since the beginning in 2008 or just recently discovered the podcast, thank you so much for giving our show a chance and for being part of the community. Daniel and I still feel incredibly lucky that we get to chat every week about Apple news and our work as indie developers.

Daniel and I covered a few topics on Core Intuition 259 yesterday, but the closing segment about the Apple design book — and indirectly, the election — was particularly interesting to me. I decided to transcribe part of the conversation. Here it is, lightly edited.

Daniel:

Alright Manton, I know what a fan you are of lavish Apple products designed for the rich. [laughter] I know therefore you have probably already placed a pre-order for the Apple Book Edition.

Manton:

Is the Edition the $300 one?

Daniel:

Yeah, the $300 one is the Edition. The $200 one is the Edition Lite. [more laughter]

Manton:

So Apple announced this book yesterday, and I believe orders are being accepted today. It’s just this very beautiful, well-produced “we worked 8 years on this” book of essentially product photos.

And I think there’s an introduction with Jony Ive. There’s a video from him that is a classic Jony Ive video about a product.

I’ve blogged about this a little bit, and actually talked about this on my microcast, Timetable. Red flags are going off for me with this product for a few reasons.

The first is, we’re a week out from the election. A lot of us are bummed out and trying to make sense of the world, and Apple releases a book of product photos. It seems out of touch. I don’t understand why they did this right now.

And the other thing, I just hit on something that bothered me about this book. I have a lot of books in this house. Bookshelves and bookshelves full of books. My wife hates the fact that I have every book that I’ve ever bought. I have a lot of books and I have a lot of art books. In a previous life I wanted to an artist, an animator. I have a lot of art books.

And so this is right up my alley, right? I love old stuff. I love art books. Why don’t I want to buy this?

And I think the reason is, unlike most art books, which are about… They’re about the artist as much as the art. And this book is just photos of iMacs.

This isn’t about the designers. And maybe there’s something in the book that I’m missing. That when I hold it I’ll say, “Oh, this book is amazing.” But I feel like this book is not quite right. It’s not about the designers.

I want to know about the designers at Apple, and why they made their choices. I don’t need this well-lit photo of the inside of a Mac Mini. There’s something missing with what they’ve done here.

Daniel:

You know, I agree with you. What you said just now is interesting to me in a few different ways. One of them is — and I know people are going to think I’m crazy for even imagining that this could possibly happen in the wake of a U.S. presidential election — but one of my instincts the day after the election, believe it or not, was actually going to Apple.com to see if Apple had some kind of commemoration or acknowledgement.

And I realized… That’s my passionate, emotional side. Because Apple has been that company on so many issues of national or global importance.

And I get it. Even if I see it as a catastrophic thing for the country and for the world, I get it that it is seen as a partisan issue, and that a lot of people would agree it would be not only poor business, but maybe poor taste to take a stand on Apple.com.

But that’s the kind of feeling I’ve had from this company over the years. I wasn’t surprised not to see something there, but that sensitivity to the current state of affairs in the world, while maybe not driving them to put something on their home page overtly in support of one direction or another… I can see how they could maybe have made an effort to come up with something that somehow spoke to the issue without taking a side. They could have done that.

And I’m not faulting them for not doing that. But your comment about the possible poor timing of releasing this right after the election, it drives it home for me that doing something like that with the home page would have reflected a level of consciousness about what’s going on — their being sympathetic or even empathic to the situation.

Releasing a self-gratifying, expensive art book certainly does not speak to sensitivity about the national and global implications of the election. Nor should it have to. But by doing it the very week of the election, it does sort of tip the sales toward insensitivity.

Manton:

Right. So we had the election. A lot of people are trying to make sense of it. Like you said, you went to Apple. “Is Apple going to say anything?” Reload, reload. No, they’re not going to say anything. “Is Apple going to say anything next week?”

The first thing they said, not about the election but the first thing they publicly said was, “We have this beautiful book.”

Yes, they didn’t mean it that way. They didn’t mean it as a reaction to the election. They’ve had this thing planned for years. But it doesn’t feel right.

I don’t want to take away anything from the designers at Apple and the people that worked on this book, because they do great work. The products in this book are amazing. They do deserve to be celebrated and talked about. But the timing does not feel right.

And like I said before, I think the substance of this book is also wrong. I want to be careful not to criticize too much, because I’m sensitive to this. I don’t want to just bash this book. It doesn’t feel like the book we need about design at Apple. Because there’s no text in it!

It celebrates objects and machines but it doesn’t celebrate people. The people are one of the most important things about design at Apple. It doesn’t seem right.

I had never thought after the election, “What would Apple say? Would they put something on their web site?” I hadn’t thought of that until you just mentioned it.

Tim Cook did send a letter to Apple employees, an email. It wasn’t really partisan, but it was kind of saying, “We know some of y’all are having trouble.”

I don’t know how he phrased it. But the sense of it was, “We’re moving forward together. We’re going to be together. That’s how we get through everything as a company.”

That was private to Apple employees. They didn’t say anything publicly. To say something publicly would have been difficult. This is kind of a cheat, but I’m just going to say it: it would have taken courage to say something about the election publicly. I’m using that word very deliberately.

Come on, Apple. Forget about the stupid headphone jack. If you want to be courageous, take a stand on something you believe in. Do it.

Daniel and Manton dive into Apple’s controversial suspension of Dash developer Kapeli’s App Store account, and respond to listener Q&A about whether non-sandboxed apps are at risk of removal from the Mac App Store.

Covering sensitive subjects like Kapeli’a suspension is difficult in a podcast format where you can’t perfectly prepare your thoughts. Did I go too far defending Bogdan Popescu? Did I not go far enough?

Maybe we’ll know with some distance from this topic whether we reacted fairly. But I don’t think I overstated how important a moment this was for the App Store — both Apple’s influence over the narrative and as a test for their power in the store. Unfortunately the story still has a very unsatisfying ending.

Manton and Daniel discuss Manton’s experience at the Release Notes conference, talk about the rationale for supporting what might be considered edge-case behaviors in apps, and dig deeper into questions of freemium pricing, reflecting on the Omni Group’s pertinent announcements. Finally they talk briefly about Google’s latest announcements and what their competition means to Apple.

Google must be doing something right with their announcements, because yesterday my son told me he wants to get a Pixel when it’s time to replace his iPhone 5S. And as much as I love our Amazon Echo, I can see Google Home taking off if it’s well-integrated with existing Google services.

Daniel and Manton react to the European Union’s €13B retroactive tax demand to Apple, talk about the impact of tax laws on indies and small companies, and weigh in on Apple’s purported AI and machine learning triumphs. Finally they catch up on their ambitions to be more productive as the busy summer transitions to fall.

I wondered whether Apple is so obsessed with privacy that they are blinded to what is possible with more computation and extensibility in the cloud. I judge their efforts not only by the remarkable work the Siri team has done, and by what Google and Amazon are building, but also by Apple’s own gold standard: the Knowledge Navigator video from 1987. That vision is too ambitious for one company to develop all the pieces for. We eventually need a more open Siri platform to get us there.

Everyone who builds blogging software should have a blog. Everyone who builds podcasting software should probably have a podcast, too. (And sometimes, like for Marco Arment, even afewpodcasts.)

So I was happy to see Supertop start a podcast recently to talk about the Castro 2 launch and other thoughts on being a 2-person indie shop. Episode 3 features Brent Simmons:

Pádraig and Oisín are joined by Brent Simmons to discuss indie app development in the wake of Vesper shutting down.

One subject I’m glad they touched on is the special challenge for a company that needs to support multiple salaries, but isn’t big enough yet to actually have significant revenue like a large company. Last week, Daniel and I talked about the balance of loving being independent but also knowing that one day you want to expand to support a small team. It’s not easy.

Manton reacts to negatively to the Swift 3 decision to disallows subclassing by default, while Daniel tries to see the bright side. The two discuss Twitter’s new invitation to apply for @verified status, and Daniel’s attempt to do so. And they quickly touch base on the upcoming Apple-sponsored reality show, “Planet of the Apps.”

Believe it or not, I was kind of holding back a little in my Swift ranting. But it was the most critical I’ve been on the show. And it’s totally okay for you to disagree! Maybe even good for the platform if you do.

Earlier this week I sent an email to subscribers of the announce list for my microblogging project. These are people who signed up, wanting to hear more about what the project was and when the beta would be available.

I talked about this on Core Intuition 241 today. Some people signed up a year ago, and the longer I went without sending an email, the more nervous I became that I was missing an opportunity to sustain interest in the project. I was stuck on the idea that the first email to the list had to be when there was a product to either test or pay for.

These decisions of when to release a product, what to write about, how to communicate new ideas without overwhelming potential customers — they seem so monumental, but the truth is it just doesn’t matter that much. When the feedback started rolling in over email, I quickly realized that I was worried for nothing. People were excited and supportive.

I have a lot of work to do over the next couple of weeks before it’s ready to open up to real users. As I’ve talked about a few times on my Timetable podcast, I’m planning a Kickstarter project to complement the web app. I’ll be sharing more soon.

Yesterday, I recorded a short episode of Timetable. I wanted to capture what the trip to San Francisco each year means to me, outside of the conference itself. I find the week a good opportunity to reset and think about where my focus should be across my projects.

We published Core Intuition episode 236 today, discussing the recent App Store announcements and a listener question about offices. We wrap up with plans for WWDC.

There has been a lot of great blog posts and podcast episodes already on the App Store subscription change. I listened to Under the Radar 31 and the Release Notes special edition today and recommend both. The most confusion seems to be around what kind of apps are appropriate for subscriptions, where by “appropriate” I mean “what Apple will approve”.

Professional apps that require “a lot of maintenance of new features and versions” don’t fit either of those categories. Would Twitter clients like Tweetbot and Twitterrific qualify for subscription pricing? After talking to Schiller yesterday, I thought so. Now, I don’t know.

As I mention on Core Intuition, apps that have a backend service with obvious hosting and maintenance costs — a music streaming service, an invoicing web app, or a blogging platform, for example — are easier for users to understand as needing to be subscriptions. Twitter apps are an interesting example because some are pure clients to Twitter’s backend, but many increasingly have their own app-specific services like timeline syncing or push notifications.

For years Apple has allowed apps to use auto-renewing subscriptions. I had an iPhone app and companion web service that was approved by Apple for auto-renewing subscriptions, after I made the case for the service as a “cloud” archive. From section 11.15 of the App Store review guidelines:

Apps may only use auto-renewing subscriptions for periodicals (newspapers, magazines), business Apps (enterprise, productivity, professional creative, cloud storage), and media Apps (video, audio, voice), or the App will be rejected

From my experience and listening to other developers, I’ve had the impression for a while that Apple would essentially reject most auto-renewing app submissions by default. While we still don’t know what “all categories” means in the new announcement, I expect it means that there will no longer be a kind of blanket rejection. Apple will still reject many apps as poorly suited for subscriptions, though, and maybe that’s okay for now.

(I’m conflicted on this point. John Gruber’s suggestion to approve everything and let the market decide is compelling and fits better with my instinct that the control should be in developers’ hands.)

“Subscription fatigue” is a real thing that I’ll occasionally hear from customers about. No one wants to pay $1/month to 40 different apps and services; it feels like a burden in a way that paying the same total price to just two apps at $20/month does not. Nevertheless, subscriptions are very powerful. Everything I’ve done over the last few years is to position myself to eventually have a recurring-revenue success.

It’s 2 weeks before WWDC, which means it was also 8 years ago that we published the first episode of Core Intuition. At WWDC that year, Apple showed off iPhone OS 2.0, MobileMe, and the iPhone 3G. The yearly cycle of improvements to the OS and hardware don’t look much different today, but Apple keeps rolling, and so the total changes since 2008 are massive.

For as many years as I’ve been out to San Francisco for WWDC (and to San Jose before then), each year I have fewer expectations for the conference itself. Some years I don’t even bother guessing or dreaming about new features — I have no pressing needs, no critical missing APIs, no questions to ask Apple engineers in the labs — and I’m happily surprised by whatever Apple gives us.

This year is a little different. It’s the first year that I can remember since the Mac OS X 10.0 and 10.1 releases where an Apple platform needed significant performance improvements to be usable for anyone except early adopters. The first couple versions of Apple Watch were ambitious on features, but now it’s time to do the less glamorous work of making the platform fast. I hope watchOS 3.0 will be the same kind of milestone that Mac OS X 10.2 was in that regard. (And like Mac OS X, I hope it can be done mostly in new software.)

Back to WWDC the conference. I’m still thinking about the interesting venue change for Monday to the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium.

In the discussion on Core Intuition 229 last month, I kept coming back to the idea that this change has to be about growing the conference to allow more developers. Since more people show up on Monday (press and business folks, for example, who have less interest in the technical sessions or labs), you could have a bigger space on Monday and then oversell the conference as a whole, knowing that some ticket holders wouldn’t be around later in the week back at Moscone West.

Maybe that creates more problems than it solves because of packed rooms and long lines to get into sessions, though. Now that I’ve had a while to think about it, it seems unlikely that Apple would risk making the conference worse just to squeeze in another 500 developers.

Could there be some creative layouts in Moscone West that Apple hasn’t tried yet? There are so many downsides to changing the venue that I want to believe it’s part of addressing the biggest issue with the conference: most people don’t win the ticket lottery.

There’s still the problem of hotels. Linking to my post about not giving up on WWDC, John Gruber singled out Airbnb as a bad solution, since there just aren’t that many rooms available. That’s true. And even worse, potential last-minute cancellations make Airbnb less reliable. Where I said Airbnb, I should have just said “cheaper hotel”.

Nevertheless, I know some developers are using Airbnb this year, and I’d like to try it next year for a change of pace and scenery away from the conference. With the convenience of Uber, the risk of settling for a place farther away seems low.

And finally, I’ve enjoyed many recent podcasts about WWDC. Two highlights: Under the Radar episode 24, where Marco Arment and David Smith share their thoughts on whether to attend the conference; and Thoroughly Considered 12, about not just WWDC but the value of attending or exhibiting at conferences as a company.

We published Core Intuition 234 today, with a follow-up discussion on Swift, working toward software releases, and more. From the show notes:

Daniel and Manton talk about the question of Swift’s dependence on Objective-C’s dynamism, how it should or will evolve, and their differences in philosophy about Swift and Objective-C. They also take stock of release discipline and managing customer disappointment with an app’s progress. Finally, they talk about the importance and difficulty of winding down old products.

One of the points I brought up on the show — and which I’ve hinted at here on the blog before — is that web developers will push Swift to become more dynamic. There’s a long history of building web server frameworks like Ruby on Rails that depend on dynamically routing requests to controllers and views, and flexible models that automatically adapt from your database schema. These features tend to get messy when faced with a more static, strongly-typed language.

There is good work being done in the Swift web community already, though. Today I spent some time building a sample app with Vapor, which is probably the closest I’ve seen someone get to the usability of existing web frameworks. I’m a little more optimistic now that we might eventually have a single language for server code and native apps.

I somehow recorded 4 podcast episodes this week. We just published episode 233 of Core Intuition, where Daniel Jalkut and I talk about the announcements from Google I/O and compare the latest Swift 3 news to our experience going through previous Apple transitions. From the show notes:

“Manton and Daniel react to Google’s I/O keynote, and weigh the threat of Allo to iMessage. They celebrate Apple’s WWDC promotion of 3rd party events, and the increasing speed of App Store reviews. Finally, they reflect on the announced delay in Swift 3’s planned ABI stability, and Daniel’s sudden FUD about embracing Swift.”

It was a big week for the NBA, too, with the first couple games of the east and west conference finals. On the latest Technical Foul, Ben Thompson and I recap round 2, especially the Spurs loss in 6 games to the Thunder:

Ben and Manton are back geeking out about the NBA. This week we talk Manton through the Spurs loss, discuss OKC versus the Warriors, and whether the Cavs are good enough.

And finally, I published 2 episodes of my microcast Timetable earlier in the week. Episode 22 was about dealing with recent stress — trying to see the bigger picture and focus on the good things. Episode 23 was about how to tell when it’s time to move on from a failed product.

Daniel and Manton discuss the iPhone SE’s evident popularity, touch on the challenges of designing for extremes in screen size, and bemoan some of Siri’s shortcomings when compared to competitors. The two also discuss tax time as an indie software developer, weigh the merits of heading to SF for WWDC, and finally delve into some deep reflections about the psychology of not shipping in too long.

We talked a lot about Siri and the Amazon Echo — the problems with both and where voice software may be headed. After we recorded, Daniel wrote a great post with additional ideas for using Siri with distance-based reminders, for example the ability to ask Siri while driving “remind me in 15 miles to get gas”:

How would this be solved? By introducing a notion of distance-relative reminders in iOS and by extension in Siri. In the same way that Siri allows you set a reminder for a specific time or for a relative time from now, it should offer the same functionality for distance.

I hope you enjoy the podcast. I’ve been thinking lately that maybe the secret with Core Intuition is that it’s not actually a developer podcast. It’s a tech podcast with major tangents into software development and business.

When I went to Open Coffee Club during SXSW week, I met several company founders and investors in Austin, and one was also an iOS developer. I usually do a poor job of promoting my own work in person, but I somehow managed to plug my Core Intuition podcast.

He hadn’t heard of the show before, and when he pulled it up to subscribe his comment was something like: “wow, you’ve been doing this for a long time”. It’s true. Daniel and I started the podcast in 2008. We only have 225 episodes, because we published episodes less frequently back in the old days, but I’ve always been proud of our consistency with the show format going back to the very beginning.

And it made me wonder: is there another Mac or iOS developer-focused tech podcast that has such a long history? Or really, many tech podcasts at all? The ones that come to mind are The Talk Show, which started in 2007, and This Week in Tech, which started in 2005.

It’s another reminder to me that a big part of success is consistently showing up to work. If you’re always starting over, you can’t build on anything and take it further. The secret with the “version 2.0” of most apps isn’t that it has new features; it’s just that it exists at all.

In a couple months, just as WWDC is about to roll around, we’ll celebrate our 8th anniversary of recording Core Intuition. Our audience keeps growing, which is amazing, but there are still a lot of people who have never heard of the show. If you like what we’ve been doing, consider telling a friend, or posting a tweet or blog post about the show.

We expanded to 2 sponsors per episode this year because we wanted to grow the podcast — to commit more time and resources to both recording and to companion web sites like the jobs site. I think 2016 will be a great year and I’m happy that Core Intuition is a key part of helping me stay independent. Thanks for your support!

Manton orders his dream phone, the iPhone SE. Daniel reflects on the growing allure of Swift, and the two discuss the risks of either adopting new technologies too soon, or holding on to the past for too long.

Also there’s this line from Daniel in the podcast that I like:

We have to be tuned into the future and tuned into the past to really do great work.

We pull in some history from Daniel’s time at Apple, and from our experience building Mac apps in the 1990s and early 2000s, and how it relates to the current Swift transition. Hope you enjoy it.

“Manton and Daniel discuss Apple’s revelation that Cookie Monster uses an iPhone, consider the Amazon Echo as the next big technology platform, and catch up with Manton’s successful 30 days of Austin coffee challenge.”

I like this episode because it touches a little on tech industry and business themes that we weren’t planning to talk about, so it captures whatever our gut feelings were on those topics. And as we talk about at the end of the show, I did end up wrapping up the coffee shop visits today. I’ve updated the coffee shop page on this site with the final list.

“Daniel and Manton discuss strategies for filing and organizing bugs. They talk about the expected iPad and iPhone announcements at Apple’s March 21 event, and they follow up on discussion about apps that delight and take their own problem domains seriously.”

I also posted episode 16 of Timetable. On this quick 3-minute show, I talk about trying not to panic when things go wrong, with a couple examples from this week.

When I tell people that I’ve started going to a new coffee shop every day for a month — and importantly, one which I’ve never been to before after living my whole life in Austin, with no duplicates or separate locations from a coffee chain — they usually ask: are you going to run out of places to go? At the beginning I didn’t know. And that has made it a particularly fun challenge, because doing something that you know is possible is boring.

I’ve never been interested in building an iOS app that someone else has already done. I’ve never been excited to write a blog post that is just a rephrasing of someone else’s idea. Starting a new project with a unique twist, even a minor one, is what makes our job as developers and writers fun.

And it’s easy to take a simple idea and build it into a more advanced project. On the latest Core Intuition, Daniel continues to suggest ways to add layers to my coffee trips, from adding photos, to publishing future locations ahead of time so that anyone can stop by and join me for a coffee. (I’m going to be doing this.)

Now at day 10, I can more easily answer the original question, though. I have 16 suggested coffee shops in the queue, so if I visit all of those, I’ll only need 4 more places to hit 30 new coffee shops in 30 days. A few of these might seem like borderline cheats — a donut shop, or a food truck to pick up a Thai iced coffee — but being exposed to new places I would never otherwise go is the whole point.